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Potted Hare

A stewed hare dish cooked in red wine with onions, spices, butter, flour, blood and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Potted Hare

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a kettle, combine hare pieces, onions, thyme, bay leaves, cloves, salt, and pepper, then pour in the red wine.

Cook

  1. Bring to a boil over medium heat and allow the wine to catch fire at the first boil.

  2. Mix butter with flour until smooth, add it to the kettle, then stir in the blood mixed with vinegar.

  3. Continue cooking for 30 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + red winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hare
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long simmering in wine.
Red wine
Supplies acidity and liquid that tenderise the meat and build the sauce's depth of flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the finished sauce a smooth, velvety texture.
Flour
Combined with butter to thicken the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the braising liquid as they cook.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour must be fully blended into the butter before it goes into the hot liquid, or it will clump rather than thicken the sauce evenly. Stirring steadily helps it disperse smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (thyme, clove, pepper, red wine, butter, flour, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, clove, pepper, red wine, butter, flour, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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